


Can't Live in Dreams

by Hedgi



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen, M/M, it's all gonna hurt though, multiple timelines so it varies, some are more flashvibe some are more gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-23
Updated: 2016-05-13
Packaged: 2018-04-23 02:22:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4859474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hedgi/pseuds/Hedgi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by the Deleted scene, Cisco's "What if you never met me?", and a tumblr post with ArgentLives, update inspired by events of 2.20 and 21</p><p>There are timelines, so many timelines, where Cisco Ramon isn't part of STAR Labs, and Barry was never struck by lightning, and none of this ever happened. There are timelines where one thing is, another isn't, where things go just slightly awry.</p><p>But that doesn't stop the dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ArgentLives](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArgentLives/gifts).



> I'm not sure where this came from exactly but here it is.

There’s a timeline where Cisco Ramon graduates high school at 15, and his parents are more interested in Dante’s senior solo with his string orchestra than the acceptance letter to Stanford addressed to their younger son. But that’s ok. That’s always how it’s been. Cisco’s used to it, has long accepted it, and packs his bags.  
Sometimes he lingers in the musical hall, where Giancarlo Aquilanti conducts a piece of music he’s heard a thousand times, and feels homesick, but more often, he hangs in the library or lecture halls, eagerly debating and discussing. He graduates early from there, too, and has as close to his pick of jobs as a brown kid’s gonna get, and feels pride, honest and true.  
  
Harrison Wells and Tess Morgan are opening the first in a series of labs in Central city, but that’s not home anymore.  
  
And then sometime in Mid-march, the dreams start, only they don’t feel like dreams, and sometimes they come while he’s awake, like sensory seizures or hallucinations or—memories. Of Harrison Wells in a wheelchair, even though Cisco’s fairly certain the man can walk. Of a white woman with a sad smile and an engagement ring, curling into his shoulder so close he can smell her perfume—but dreams don’t smell, do they? Of a stork of a white guy, all knees and elbows and a smile like the sun’s coming out. Bits and pieces, like a television show playing over and over and over. Good memories, and bad—so scared sometimes, like when he dreams Harrison Wells kills him, or a man with an obscured face points a really cool looking gun at the stork-guy. Once, he dreams of bees.  
  
But there are the hugs. The woman, the man, others—a black guy Cisco thinks he remembers, vaguely, as a cop in central city, the one who believed him and not the bully who jumped him in 10th grade. In those dreams, Cisco and feel warmth, hear heartbeats.  It’s like something from a comic book. So now he knows three things:

  1.        These are not just dreams
  2.        He has never met these people
  3.        They are his family



One day, a name slips through. Barry Allen. A quick might-be-illegal search on the internet turns up several dozen people with that name, but only one in Central city.  
Cisco packs a backpack, buys a train ticket, and hopes that Barry Allen remembers him, too.

* * *

  
There’s a timeline where Central city didn’t work out, where his older brother was hit by a car, bled out in the street and he never forgave himself for it. The whole family moved, but finding new jobs were hard and the only way not to get caught up in the gangs and violence was in books, science, math. He escaped, but it was still hard, with a record under your name for fighting back, fighting, fighting, fighting.

Cisco didn’t give up, through, refused to stop living. Looked for the stars on a fogged night. He was smart, he found a good college that wouldn’t break the bank, applied for every scholarship he could. It took longer, so much longer, because—he proved himself, again and again but still from kindergarten on no one had believed in him.

He still graduated early, mechanical engineering major, a couple of mini-minors in things that he’d just wanted to study. Music—a way to stay close to the family that left him, the family he left.

And then the dreams started up, and he wondered if he finally cracked, if it was all too much. He dreamed of a building he’d never seen blazing and knowing that people he cared about had died.  
That night he called his mother for the first time in three years.  
  
The dreams progressed into the spring, more vivid than anything they should have been, and they struck at any time, triggered flashes of something like memory.  
In one, he saw his second brother, pain in his eyes and bruising at his temple, and made a choice. He said a name—he didn’t recognize it. Barry Allen. _His name is Barry Allen_.  
The next night the name had a face, a body, a light-in-the-eyes, and Cisco felt sick knowing he’d betrayed a friend.

A friend? Yes. That certainty thudded against his chest, like the steady beeping of the heart monitor in another vision, the same guy- tall, skinny, white-as-paper on a hospital bed. Was that his fault?

“Why can’t I remember?” he asked out loud, once, and the ghost of a voice echoed, a fuzzy tawny scene playing out in his mind of Barry Allen’s hand on his shoulder. “You’ll remember. We’ll find each other.”

Cisco sketched out everything he could remember with the hand of long practice, until he had a skyline. Central city. He’d start there.

* * *

 

There’s a timeline where Cisco’s late for the class he’s a TA for at Hudson university, working with Martin Stein—he beat out Hartley Rathaway for the job and that felt as good as the paycheck—his head still ringing with the idea that he knew this man, that once the professor had hugged him like a son. The professor is in the middle of a lecture when he slips in the back, talking about time travel, and Cisco mouths the words along with him, catapulted back into a memory that he knows he does not have.  
  
“That’s so cool, isn’t it?” the kid next to him says at the end of the lecture—and Cisco nods and frowns, because he knows that voice, that tone, that—

“I’m Barry. I like your shirt.”

“Cisco,” Cisco checks what he’s wearing and laughs. “I like yours.”

They are both wearing “Keep Calm and Han Shot First” tees.

* * *

 

There’s a timeline where the dreams start up in mid-December 2013 instead of spring, 2015, and Cisco hears two Ronnies saying they’ll go into the pipeline. Cisco goes in, instead, his last clear thoughts being Caitlin screaming at him from the otherside of the radio, and a man he knows deep in his gut, is about to be hit by lightning.  
  
Months and months and months later, as Martin Stein throws a fireblast in confused, hazed desperation, Cisco recognizes the faces and breaks through.

* * *

 

There's a timeline out there where Barry Allen lives in Paris with his mother following his father’s death, and Cisco buys a plane ticket and wishes he knew French instead of Spanish.

* * *

 

There’s a timeline where he is the Fastest Man alive, hit by lightning, and not running from something, but to someone. 

* * *

 

There’s a timeline where, after the dreams start and the name of the guy with the sunshine smile and the sad eyes falls from someone’s tongue, Cisco goes hunting and finds a single newspaper article.

**ALLEN FAMILY MURDERED IN HOME INVASION**

Cisco weeps that night on his bathroom floor for something he didn’t know he’d lost.

* * *

 

He finds him, again, and again, and again.  
The universe wants him to.


	2. More timelines

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> because why not

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in honor of flashvibe week and also pain.

There is a timeline where the dreams start in the dark winter of 2000, in a blaze of light—blue and red and gold. Cisco is nine, too old to cry to mama, but with the dreams he doesn’t understand come worse—broken windows and glass baubles on the mantel piece, things he can’t explain as the world rings in his years. Even visions of the tearstained face of a kid three grades up isn’t enough to keep him from being afraid. And then it’s the front door that shatters under a heavy boot, not his hand, and a strong grip pining his arms behind him no matter how hard he fights.

A decade later, though time means nothing, when he’s all but forgotten his name and his dreams are haunted by visions of what is-outside, what was, what might-have-been, a voice he’s never heard while waking echoes down the cement corridor. It’s brash and harsh and static with desperation, and a face flickers past his cell door. It twists with Worry, and Cisco knows it. There’s no room for emotion here, but still he worries about the boy-man from his dreams. They’ll break him too. The only way out of these halls and cages is in the blue-tint world that hurts after, but to pretend at freedom makes it worth it.

But that night—or maybe morning, so long since daylight touched too-pale skin, there are sparks and flickers and the door breaks off in a rush of wind and burst of light. Freckled arms, warm and soft as a voice touch the chains, shatter them. “I’m getting us both out. C’mon, hurry.”

They set the others free, too.

~

There’s a timeline where the Particle Accelerator turns on, exactly according to plan, January 13, 2020, and Cisco stands beside Drs.  Harrison and Tess Morgan-Wells on the dais, beaming. When the crowd disperses and everyone packs up, success singing in their veins despite the light rain, he accepts the ride from Caitlin Raymond, stopping for ice cream along the way, and grinning at Ronnie and little Crystal when they reach the little house. The celebration lasts long, and all is well, until two weeks later Caitlin’s lips freeze a glass of soda-water solid, and Cisco sees glimpses of a mother, father, girlfriend sitting vigil beside a comatose CSI. Something tells him he should be there, but standing in the hospital doorway, he cannot say what it was, or how he knew. So all he offers is “I think we can help.”

Nothing went to plan, after all, perhaps.

~

There’s a timeline where Cisco Ramon doesn’t have any dreams at all. He never will, asleep under a gravestone with a single date.

~

There’s a timeline where Barry’s desperate, after Zoom. Where he looks at them all in turn and says, “I have to try” and the machine vaporizes him while Cisco’s standing soaked to the skin on the roof. It’s so much worse than watching Eobard flake off into nothing, even if he didn’t see it in real-time, and it hurts, a physical ache like the phantom pain of a shredded heart and ribcage turned to pulp. Cisco stands in the workroom, dripping, staring at the empty space and wants to shatter himself, looking at the scraps of suit.  Their suit. _His suit._ If he’d done better, he thinks. If he’d been better, used his powers sooner, learned more about them. If he’d seen that Jay was a lie, if he’d found another way.

Cisco grips the fragments, all that remains, and hopes-prays-pleads-begs for a vibe, for the blue light and stabbing pain that mean all isn’t lost.  
  
But nothing comes.

~

There’s a timeline where Caitlin goes out to coffee with Ronnie, the March night crisp and cool, danger averted. She doesn’t come in to work the next morning. Neither does Barry. Ronnie and the Steins are missing, too, and Cisco tries everything he can to find them. When a flicker of blue grants him location, Wells frowns, asks how he knows, but believes.

They arrive too late. Nothing is left to save but bodies from desecration.

~

There’s a timeline where the visions begin in spring, and Cisco doesn’t know who these people are or what they mean, but they mean something, so he makes the trip to Central city one day in early June, just in time for the sky to open up and a name he didn’t know he knew falls foreign from his mouth. He runs along streets he’s never seen, desperate to help, somehow, some way. The whole in the sky closes up. The papers say that a man called the Flash saved the city, and died.

The dreams say otherwise, a mask stripped from his face, yellow and blue from bruising as he sits in a glass box. No one comes to save him. So Cisco will. Somehow.

~

There’s a timeline where Cisco holds out a hand in a whirling vortex, a storm of energy blue and gold and colors with no name, petrified and desperate, tears that might be fear, or sorrow, or relief like rain. Around him, the thunder of time, time, time pulses with each crackle of lightning like lifelines splitting open, swirling around Barry, bright yellow and carmine against that blue blue blue that is in visions and vibes and portals and the nightmare lightning that skitters across Zoom. There is only wind, and wind, and words torn from a raw throat until Barry’s hand meets Cisco’s. Real and warm and there.

He doesn’t have his speed.

Two days later, Zoom comes, and the timeline moves on without them.

~

There are timelines of coffee shops and next door neighbors and coworkers and celebrity crushes, and dreams tinged blue. Timelines that stretch out and on and timelines that end, short, sudden, too soon to tell.

So many possibilities, one constant, or close enough.   



End file.
